Lived Too Fast
Lived Too Fast – Royal Oak, Michigan
photography
Make It Last
Seventy degrees and sunny – just give me that.
I wait all year for May days. Those warm, sunny, apple-blossom-scented days with a gentle breeze and the birds chirping. After a cold, bitter winter in Michigan, it’s these kinds of days in May that keep us all sane. Gives us something to look forward to.
The problem this year is that the tree blossoms won’t last long, with the wind and the rain. Us and the bees – we have a short window of springtime opportunity.
So make it last.
Make it last and give us a bit of the warm, pleasant days before the grogginess of summer. Before our modest humidity takes hold, and people start turning on their air conditioners.
Give us a few days of short-sleeves-and-pants weather, where we won’t be all sticky by sundown. Where we can warm up in the sun, and cool off with the breeze.
Let that scent linger, just a little bit, and fill our nose with memories and hope. Give the bees something to be busy with.
Make it last.
On Processing Photos
I did this a while back on portraits, but here’s a little behind-the-scenes on how I process my photos in Lightroom.
Let’s take a photo from the Heidelberg Project in Detroit – blending a few favorite subjects of mine: an abandoned house, public art in an urban setting, good mix of light and deep shadows.
Here’s a before and after. The photo was captured with a Canon 7D and 24-70mm f/2.8 Sigma lens. The framing of the brick pillar and the burned black ceiling, with the shaft of light streaming down the stairs, made for an interesting scene.
I start with exposure. Is the frame too dark? Too bright? How about white balance. After adjusting those in Lightroom, I pick my VSCO present. These days, it’s Film 05′s Kodak Ektar 100. That particular film setting has a lot of options, but I usually stick with the default, or play with the Contrast+ setting.
I like Ektar because of its high-contrast, green-tinted-shadows look. It’s not afraid to let the shadows go completely to black, and it’s a warmer film tone. But that’s just the start.
From there I’ll probably add a bit more punch in the contrast setting, drop the highlights a bit to let more detail in the bright spots, and drop the blacks down to give it that really contrasty look. Shadows are my friend.
Depending on the image, I’ll also reduce the saturation a bit. Adding contrast makes the colors pop a bit too much for my liking (those shoes might be a bit too blue for my taste).
Increase the sharpening a tad (usually to the 30 mark, with some masking to only sharpen the edges), maybe bump the clarity (only for non-people photos), and increase the color noise reduction if I have to. Peeking at the shadows and dark spots in the photos lets me know if there is color noise.
Hit the “Remove Chromatic Aberration” toggle if I need to, and do any kind of lens or perspective corrections if I have to. And then I’ll add a bit of a vignette and, especially for VSCO film packs, reduce the grain level. My settings rarely have grain going anywhere above 20-30.
As a last touch, I’ll sharpen little details with the adjustment brush, spot remove anything that seems out of place, and crop a bit.
That’s it. Nothing complicated or fussy. I’ll spend a very short amount of time on a photo, and bring it into Photoshop to do any kind of heavy lifting. Getting it most of the way there in camera is the important part, allowing me to make the styling adjustments as needed.
Questions? Give me a shout.
Abandoned Ann Arbor
I try to keep a running list of places to photograph in my head. But that doesn’t always work, because my memory is terrible.
What usually works is taking a photo of the place as a reminder, and then returning to the spot when I get a chance. Such was the case with this abandoned garage in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
I drove by this place in December and immediately pulled over to do some quick exploring. I caught a glimpse of the inside, and thought, “I must return.”
So I did. A quick climb through the shattered window (and torn pant leg) later, I was inside and “urbexing.”
It’s hard to tell what the place was before the roof caved in. The weird part was the all the stuffed animals strewn about. Bags and bags of them, and they were everywhere: on the furniture, on the floor, on the balcony.
The place had just what I look for in photos: strong, deep shadows with shafts of light showing some intense color. It was a lot of fun.
Besides the torn pant leg, of course.